The invention relates to the field of medical imaging and more particularly to a method and system in which a region of interest of a patient may be displayed for the diagnosis and treatment of coronary diseases.
Diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease can include acquiring an accurate assessment of vessel morphology. Diagnosis and treatment can include a practitioner guiding and deploying a surgical instrument inside the vascular system of a patient while being assisted by a medical imaging system.
The medical imaging system allows the acquisition, processing and real time display of two-dimensional (2D) images representing the vascular system of the patient and the surgical instrument. With these images, the practitioner may guide the instrument in the vascular system. Diagnosis can include detecting defects such as stenosis (which is an abnormal narrowing in a blood vessel).
FIG. 1 includes a schematic diagram that generally illustrates a vessel 10 with a narrowing 12. Particularly for the diagnosis, an intravascular sensor is employed to collect information for analysis. The “intravascular sensor” can generally include devices that could be introduced in the vessels of the patient with the purpose of sensing some properties of the anatomy, precisely at the location of the sensor on the device. Such devices include, but are not limited, to IVUS (Intra-Vascular Ultra Sound), OCT (Optical Coherent Tomography), Intravascular MRI, temperature probe, pressure wire, and Doppler wire.
Several techniques are known for analyzing information delivered by any type of intravascular sensor or imager in relationship with the vasculature.
A certain known technique employs the practitioner knowledge of anatomical structures that can be identified in a reference image so as to register the information collected along a pullback of the intravascular sensor. One drawback of this certain known technique is that the practitioner is engaged in a medical procedure and is generally not available to interact in a manner to accomplish this task with desired accuracy.
Another technique as described “X-IVUS: Integrated x-ray and IVUS system for the Cathlab,” by Bárbara Martin-Leung, Kai Eck, Jörg Bredno, and Til Aach; PHILIPS™ Research Laboratories & Institute for Signal Processing; University of Luebeck, but there is no description of synchronization performed between the sensor and the x-ray imager.
Yet another technique as described in U.S. Publication No. 2002/0049375A1 entitled “Method and apparatus for real time quantitative three-dimensional image reconstruction of a moving organ and intra-body navigation”, relies on additional navigation devices to provide the location of the sensor in the three-dimensional (3D) space. Drawbacks of this technique include the additional cost and complexity of the additional navigation device.